Summary: Vision Res. Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 449459, 1994
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The Memorability and Discriminability of
Primitive Perceptual Units in Infancy
SCOTT A. ADLER,* CAROLYN ROVEE-COLLIER*?
Received 29 January 1993; in revised form 15 July 1993
Three-month-olds were operantly trained to kick to move a block mobile that displayed a horizontal
and a vertical line (`ctextons") arranged as L, T, or + on each side. Delayed recognition was tested
either 0, 1, 3, 5, 7, or 9 days later with either the same or a different display. Infants failed to
discriminate between Ls and Ts after delays longer than 1 hr but discriminated both from +s, which
contains an additional texton (the line crossing), after delays as long as 7 days but not 9. Also, they
remembered +s longer than L.sand Ts. These data indicate that the same primitive perceptual units
that mediate adult texture segregation are differentially discriminated and differentially memorable
in early infancy.
Textons Infants Memory Forgetting Perception.
INTRODUCTION
Several current models of visual information-processing,
such as Treisman's (1986, 1988; Treisman & Gelade,